The 7th blog in the Healthcare Predictions & Perspectives blog series. This blog series is focused on healthcare transformational strategies that are enabled through Health IT and Health Information Governance best practices.
In the 1990's I wrote, in a column for the Journal of the Healthcare Financial Management Association, that data (the foundation of information) was the new bottom line. From a financial perspective I continue to believe this is true and there are several large healthcare organizations across the country that bear this out.
My comment came from my experiences with health information - positive and negative. Anyone that has worked in healthcare has run into practitioners who see no reason to record data because it's all in my head. Records for a few continue to be for billing and nothing else; and the realm of their patient data remains solely in their practice. They get by.
Work on health administrative transactions in the early 1990s demonstrated the need for a common vocabulary across healthcare entities. The administrative simplification portion of the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act grew from a frustration among providers and payers for more uniformity of information, including the mandating of classification code sets. Even then there was a call for more detailed coding to bring forward greater information about the patient and the services received.
Fortunately, the efforts to develop administrative simplification also gave a push to those working on standards for clinical data and information especially with the proliferation of electronic medical records. A decade after HIPAA saw the birth of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), which, in part, served the purpose of coordinating with the various standards bodies' transactions and terminologies, to allow for the movement of data and information across the healthcare universe. This is an effort still underway, with more to come.
Meanwhile, our nation's leading provider and payer organizations concentrated on the value of bringing their data together for purposes of improving quality and reducing costs. Clinical, financial, and operations data and information were identified, collected, and analyzed. This effort was not necessarily at the level of detail we see today, but these effort began to pay off as providers faced competition and reduced reimbursement. Payers also recognized the value of looking at their data (and often requesting more) to determine payment levels and providers of choice.
The ICD-10 rules of 2009 and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) helped to accelerate the need for more information by increasing the ability to send more detailed clinical information and permitting and providing the ability to exchange information while maintaining integrity; all through standardization of the electronic health record. The potential to exchange data for care along with financial audits to ensure medical information substantiated claims also moved many organization to invest in internal data integrity improvement programs.
The high cost of US healthcare compared with the quality of care in other nations has also stimulated these improvements. However, healthcare consumers have also focused on healthcare information access like never before. In ten short year the requirement for comparison healthcare quality information, pricing transparency, information exchange, and the development of patient portals have arisen from consumer pressure. Payers such as Medicare are changing health reimbursement to a quality and outcome formula. Population health needs are now better understood and the need to use information from provider systems for public health and research has opened up the call for exchange of information and revisions in privacy requirements.
Healthcare organizations, especially providers, cannot ignore the need to identify, organize, analyze, and govern or control their information resource. Information is not only their bottom line, it is their survival resource.
Join our Twitter Chat: Healthcare Transformation: Predictions and Perspectives #InfoTalk
On March 17th at 9:00 PT/12:00 pm ET, @IronMtnHealth is hosting a Twitter chat using #InfoTalk to further the dialog on transformational strategies that are enabled through Health IT and Health Information Governance. If you have been involved in Health IT and information governance-related projects, we'd love to have you join.
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The 7th blog in the Healthcare Predictions & Perspectives blog series. This blog series is focused on healthcare transformational strategies that are enabled through Health IT and Health Information Governance best practices.
